


Dinner Over Food

by bible



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Codependency, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Introspection, Isolation, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Rough Oral Sex, just the usual fucked up shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 08:04:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12954912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: “We were still falling into the absorptive and ever-present death we’ve always shared. We still are. The ocean has nothing to do with it.”“No, it doesn’t,” Hannibal turns away from the window that showcases a lovely couple of two teenaged boys playing, tanned, among the sand, and he draws the ghostly curtain with the texture of a wedding gown over the view, “And I prefer my own work to be accredited to myself. I just wish you wouldn’t look at the sea like that.”





	Dinner Over Food

            Gothic architecture has always made Will claustrophobic. With its flying buttresses, seemingly elbowing outsiders away, its rose windows peering like burning, all-seeing eyes, and its pointed cathedrals, it is an ominous and hateful constructive style. When he approaches, the church makes his toes curl in his oxfords. He knows the churches were built with the intention to eschew away demonic presences with its abrasive walls, but he cannot help but feel he is the target of this castigation.

Simply because he is the Devil’s lover.

            Under judgment constantly. A gargoyle spout grotesquely gawks from across the brownstone window. This window, smeared with bird feces and its glass rotten with time, mars the view of any onlooker. Save for the gargoyle, of course, with its open mouth, stone teeth teeming within its gaping maw, perpetually aghast at the ongoings within the brownstone it faces, where drunken Austrians and non-celibate ministers and two cannibalistic sinners reside. And while it does not adhere to Hannibal’s fantastical and royal pretentions, it is certainly serving something for the man.

            A pale cloud the color of a lemon sits in the broad, yawning sky, unmoving. Will looks out the window, pasts the air bubbles forever cast in its glass, past the stretching black pinnacles of the neighboring church, and wills the cloud to swim through the hot, hot sky and block out the sun. It is too hot to get out of bed and Will’s hair curls wet at the temples where sweat dollops his skin, his glasses fogged with humidity.

            “It’s hot today,” Will observes.

            Hannibal is sitting beside the bed in a creaking chair, drawing. When his fingers deftly manipulate his pencil, the sinewy tendons of his forearm jump. For whatever reason, this fills Will’s mouth with saliva. Pencil lead encrusts the side of Hannibal’s hand, shining like fish scales.

            “Shall I open the window?” Hannibal suggests, eyes not darting from his work.

            “No. I don’t want anyone to see.”

            “To see?” Now Hannibal looks up from his work, his pencil stilling, and he sets it on the desk. When he joins Will in the bed, sheets greyed by dust and time, Will turns and pillows his head against the nook of his shoulder, “See what, in particular? Our identities? Or the body?”

            “It severs us from the rest of the world,” he nods at the top-curved window, intercepted by muntins, its dreamy censorship of the real world putting them in some sort of non-reality, “We’re better off alone here.”

            Hannibal’s red mouth curves up in a smile and he laces his fingers together, propped behind his short-cropped, greasy hair. “And this one piece of glass is keeping us from the rest of the world.”

            “There is nothing,” A pause from Will, but he does not think or mull or even move, “That the world can offer us that is better than what we already have.”

            “Yes. The window. Fragile as the teacup.”

            They hardly leave the attic anymore. The air is stifling and condemning and Will thinks that this is not unlike a cave of sorts. Sometimes they traverse the short trip, separately, to the grocery or the market for intermittent needs, but usually, they can find their meat within the brownstone itself.

            Will doesn’t know if he wants to leave. Sometimes he slips into midday dreams about standing in the ocean, watching the tides lap at the sea, the Pacific cold and refreshing as it swallows his legs, seafoam dredges curling beneath the bends of his knees. He will be fishing, somehow wrangling Virginia black crappies from the saltwater. Hannibal will be behind him, casting a shadow over the white sand, the red sun outlining his antlers in his silhouette.

            When he awakens from these dreams, he turns to find Hannibal watching him with an affectless gaze.

            But it isn’t as though Will doesn’t despise Hannibal very often.

            These days drag. Hannibal has spent most of his time drawing and drawing with his neck bent and his stationary pinning the walls, stacking upon the floor. When the morning light casts through the window and illuminates the room, there is always a new rendition of Will’s face on the old stone or scattered among their belongings.

            He is a madman, bereft of cooking (they have only one rust-caked stove top and no oven), and filling his time with the other creationism that he can control.

            Sometimes Will models, most times he does not. Hannibal’s muse—he whispers to him, “ _Mano vienintelis ir vienintelis_ ”—and inspiration, Will features in the place of Apollo or Dionysus, sometimes he gets his portrait done alone. Usually mythological. Hannibal loves the storytelling allegories that mythology provides. He likes to make Will his character.

            One day, Hannibal provided Will a drawing that made Will’s stomach knot. He was reading _Against Civilization_ with anticipation curled in his spine, and Hannibal put down his pencil and slid over a large canvas with the carefully detailed setting of a place belonging to the past. It was of Will, of course, but he was not sculptured and draped in silk cloth. He was standing in his classroom, mid-lecture. Among his auditorium were spirits: Abigail Hobbs, Myriam Lass, Randall Tier, all dead, taking notes, embellished with their final wounds. (Or what would be, in Hannibal’s mind.)

            Will pushed the drawing away from his knees, where Hannibal had set it. He used his fingertips to tentatively touch it, as if it were poisoned with anthrax. He looked back at his primitivist essay and mumbled, “I prefer the erotic drawings of me being fed grapes.”

            (Of course, Hannibal had never drawn such a media-imbued stereotype, but Will was angry, his heart pounding in his chest, hatred soiling his blood. He knew the classless would offend.)

            It wasn’t fair. They had no mirrors in the attic, and Hannibal never drew himself. Hannibal could constantly present Will with a vision of how he looked in his own mind. Hannibal presented Will with his rendition of him, and Hannibal was kept in the throes of his own self-perception.

            Hannibal’s world in this attic. These presentations of drawings are reflections of Hannibal’s visions. Will is confronted with them constantly. He wonders what Hannibal is in his own mind.

            Hannibal now is dry and cool to the touch in the bed beside him, while Will is slick with gleaming perspiration. Controlling man, Hannibal can adhere to anything. His body adjusts upon his own psychological whims. Will has always been amazed at this mad willpower. He feels like he has been dusted with powder and he smells good. Like his own skin, and some sort of indescribable musk, his perfumed persona, buried underneath Will’s nose that he digs into his armpit. He’s not mad at him now, and he’s not even sure if he hates him.

            He is in a stasis of uncertain and wavering comfort at the moment. The longer they stay in the attic, the longer it will be this way.

*

            Hannibal is bored, of course, of the routine, and of the sleepy fever-space of their attic. They bond warm and playful for a good amount of time but this disingenuous pillow speak is behind the attraction that drew them together initially.

            Hannibal sees Will nestled in the dusted, comforting womb of sheets, and he decides he must be removed, placed into a new zone of uncontrolled wilderness for Hannibal to observe him in and to adore. He doesn’t want Will to become too comfortable, and as a result, too _boring_.

            When they finally leave with their handheld valises of clothes and drawings, Will is dazed by the sunlight, his skin milkpale and face sallow. They walk through the cobblestone streets with the blank and inconspicuous gaits of two competent, unsuspicious, handsome, normal men. Hannibal arrives at the seaside when they finish walking and walking wordlessly and by the time they reach the sand the sky is the color of cold tea and the ocean is the deep venetian red of a velvet-lined blackbox.

            “Are you planning to sleep in the sand?” Will asks, peering out at the sea with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his soft cotton shorts, something odd for him but comfortable, thin fabric clinging to the curve of his ass in a way that makes Hannibal’s fingers twitch.

            “I thought we should look at what brought us here,” Hannibal says, “Thanks never goes unheeded by the world.”

            “I don’t think I’ll ever quite forget the ocean’s ministrations against me.”

            “’Against.’”

            Will gives Hannibal an exhausted but affectless look, “Yes: _against_. My intentions were of finality.”

            Hannibal faces the ocean and thinks about this. Then he faces Will. Hannibal leans down and grabs his chin, and kisses him gently on the lips. He has nice lips, and they fit well against Will’s bottom lip, brush against his scruffy chin. Will does not move, save to switch the valise between hands. His eyes stay open, observing the not-yet-night sky darken Hannibal’s face with something impending and final. His fingers slip to his shorts and he gropes his over the white cloth.

            Will tilts his head up minutely and kisses him back finally, and Hannibal, there on the shore, slips his hands up the legs of his shorts and strokes his upper thighs until Will is pink in the cheeks (face hidden under the flush of sundown) and his mouth parts, cock stirring between his legs.

            Hannibal steps back when Will is warm and horny and dazed and does not continue to touch him, leading him to a hotel even though Will’s cock is hard between his legs and he hides himself behind Hannibal with the shy and damaged ego of the ashamed.

*

            Hannibal keeps taking his toys away.

            A hotel—a far cry from the brownstone attic. Perhaps he was getting cranky with its limitations, but Will never pictured him enthroned in this modernity. Hannibal likes the traditionalist and historical places of the past where ghosts played and where the walls were embedded with royalty and time or perhaps they housed some far relative of a man who once met God.

            This one is certainly sleek and fashionable, undoubtedly, and Hannibal can’t help but appreciate the slender and stylish work of some brilliant architect, but the vapidity and emptiness of location would not bode well for damaging Will’s psyche with its intonations of past horror. It’s how he managed to exist within the attic of the brownstone, opposite the gothic church. He saw Will peer at it with a sweat-dappled brow.

            But Hannibal has always been a creative mind. Managing to turn the sterile prison cell into a palace construct of his own memory where every corner of each dark room teemed with secrets and stories and tucked-away little passages of history was only one example of his psychological impact. Still, the question remained of what he could derive out of Will Graham’s beautiful, conjoined mind they both played with.

*

            “The ocean is older than us all, older than all that have lived and have died. This is the same water that was split by the Israelites, that drank the victims of Hurricanes predating the Meiji restoration, the same water that ate and ate lives. You’d think that would make it teeming with death, every particle holding onto the memory of some long-forgotten sailor or beach-goer or pirate or yacht victim. Every particle holding onto the fat of whales, the decayed teeth of toothy, unnamed fish, the suckers of tentacles and the slimy pieces of starfish. The deposited bodies of missing people that only their killers and the seaside knows the outcome of. But I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as unhistorical and untainted as anything else part of the natural world. Man intoxicates it but it will prevail and it is not responsible. All that simmers in its body is not its responsibility; no, not even the victims of storms. When all life is gone it will be here as it always was, soaking the shores and roiling under the whims of the stronger and more unknown moon above. It is unaware of us, and it does not care for us.”

            “Stop trying to make me feel better about it. We were still falling into the absorptive and ever-present death we’ve always shared. We still are. The ocean has nothing to do with it.”

            “No, it doesn’t,” Hannibal turns away from the window that showcases a lovely couple of two teenaged boys playing, tanned, among the sand, and he draws the ghostly curtain with the texture of a wedding gown over the view, “And I prefer my own work to be accredited to myself. I just wish you wouldn’t look at the sea like that.”

            “Like what?”

            “With scorn.”

            Will sits up and his heart thumps up near his neck and he feels like a man who’s forgotten everything but this moment, empty beyond the past, knowing there are spaces to be filled, and he feels in his arms and legs and feet a sensation of falling, falling, falling, but he can’t figure out why. He blinks a few times, the white hotel room revealing nothing, the smell of blood somewhere close. “If the ocean has swallowed so many lives, why not ours?”

            “Because, Will, it is moot on our human matters.” He runs a hand over his head, slicking back his hair more perfectly against his head, “And I like to think of myself as a force of nature stronger than the sea.”

*

            Will is laying on his back and he watches a square of moonlight peek in from the window and settle over Hannibal’s face, slicing his eye in half. His neck is strained and tight around Hannibal’s cock

as he fucks his mouth noisily with the medicinal and practiced thrusts that Will associates with a surgeon. He thinks of the doctor at work in plastic blue gloves, thinks of him staunching Abigail Hobbs’s bloody throat with a firm grip just as he does now—sans wound.

            _Hannibal is upside-down_ , Will thinks blearily, eyes fluttering, chest heavy as his mouth is used and petted and Hannibal looks over him. This is how he must have looked when drugging him, he supposes, and Hannibal says in a voice distant and drowned by the wet suckling noises:

            ,,˙ʇᴉ s,ʇɐɥʇ 'ɥʇnoɯ ɹnoʎ oʇuᴉ dn 'ʇᴉ ǝʞɐʇ 'ʇno puɐ uI,,

            _˙ʇᴉ s,ʇɐɥ┴ ˙ʇᴉ s,ʇɐɥ┴_

Will gasps and lets the spit soak his cheeks, his eyes closed now, because Hannibal’s upside down face saying these dizzying words gives him vertigo, and it doesn’t help that all the blood is rushing to his penis.

            When Hannibal cums he throws his head back and fills Will and the slice of moonlight goes over his neck, and Hannibal squeezes Will’s throat as if to push it down, as if he’s his property. This makes Will feel extraordinarily aroused and he cums over his belly as well.

*

            Will never expected a picnic. As Hannibal has explained, the Out is uncivilized and wild and unbecoming and the Inside is safe and handsome and well-lit, hiding his monstrous meals and more importantly, making it more appetizing. But perhaps he just wants Will more at home for being, in his words, “Such a brilliant young man. Using that mouth for good.”

            Because they’re perched by a stream, hidden by the shivering green leaves of trees in the oncoming cold of late September.

            They have a familiar dish of Langue d’agneau and then they have a collection of fig preserves spread onto hot bread and drink some wine whose name Will doesn’t register. It’s a hedonistic meal and when he’s done snacking on the body of ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓▓ and her dark insides sautéed in a delicious sauce, Will feels a bout of primitive energy that he can only account to some sort of primordial association that comes with cannibalism.

            He goes to his feet and removes his shoes, clambers up a tree with the strength of some long-forgotten forensics training in his youth, where he ran in sweatshirts through the woods… The image fades in his head, but he feels that this time was important then.

            As he climbs higher and higher up the trunk, he finds an outreaching branch with a dip, perfect for sitting in, and he does, straddling it (like he often does to Hannibal at night).

            “It is good to see you with so much energy!” Hannibal laughs from below, neck arched back, “Poor pessimists hardly play.”

            “I’m just getting away from you!” But Will’s voice is full of humor.

            Hannibal grins and reaches up to grab the end of his foot, but Will pulls it back before he can grab it. “Tantalizing, aren’t you?” Hannibal cries up.

            “Sit down, Hannibal. I have a story for you!”

            This high voice where their smiles break the usual brooding monotony is probably a result of the wine or insanity, and Will laughs weakly through the fingers he clamps over his mouth. Hannibal sits down Indian-style on the grass that sways and Will leans on the tree branch so his chest is aligned with it, arms scratched up from the climb, leaves shielding him.

            “It’s mythological, but supposedly a Euhemerism. The story of Tantalus.”

            And although Hannibal is perpetually familiar with Tantalus and his preceding Sipyllian nature, he listens to his beloved one tell the story as his foot sways.

            Tantalus, favored by the Gods, was dining with these superior beings, though he was only partially mortal. For a sacrifice he offered his divinely attractive son, Pelops, as the meal. They refused to eat save for Demeter, absentminded with grief. Tantalus, his dastardly mechanism discovered and his savagery and anti-altruistic nature upheaved, was banished to Tartarus. (“It’s called the Black Lake, now,” Will provides.) Knee-deep in the dark water, he stood perpetually hungry and thirsty but incapable of acting, for when he reached for the fruit that hung delicious and low (“I imagine a pomegranate,” Hannibal interrupts.) the branch would seize, keeping him from touching. When he bent to drink the water, the water would vanish.

            Hannibal stands up, “And so the word ‘tantalize’ came from him.”

            “Yes,” Will smiles, and when Hannibal reaches for his foot again, Will pulls it back once more.

            “And Tantalus, was he a monster?” Hannibal implores, “For offering his beloved? To impress the great and the powerful, as is ritual? It is his most precious belonging, after all.”

            “Yes, of course he’s a monster,” Will insists, “Of course. Anyone with self-respect would eat the beloved himself. If Pelops is his most precious belonging, why offer it to someone less precious?”

            Hannibal finally gets a hold on Will’s foot, and Will curls his toes.

            “I’d never feed you to anyone else.”

            Will licks a dark splatter of sauce off of his wrist.

            “Why don’t we ever use the word ‘cannibal?’”

            Hannibal’s dark eyes are stone-cold and unrevealing as he stares up at him, rat-like. “It simplifies things. And I don’t like its connotation. The modern society—and the Greek mythological one, it seems—associates the word with immediate evil. And no things are simply that black and white. But perhaps I’m flamboyant: ‘dinner’ over ‘food.’”

*

            Some days, Will is insatiable. He eats and eats and Hannibal has to keep cooking for him, plating more and more foods before him, happy to feed him. Will licks his fingers and is fed oysters and watermelon and chocolate and asparagus and figs and chiles and cinnamon and basil and garlic and human and human and human.

            Aphrodisiacs.

            Some days, Hannibal is insatiable. He has to wrench more and more orgasms out of Will as he gives him more than he thought he could, Hannibal’s fingers curled up in him, massaging him here and there, their mouths wet and bitten, his sizable cock making an outline in Will’s flat stomach, making him cry sometimes, cries that Hannibal could swallow.

            When they run out of Vaseline they use olive oil and then they just settle on spit, because Will didn’t want to be seasoned.

            It didn’t hurt that bad.

*

            One day, they’ll find that bereft of responsibility makes for a leisurely if purposeless life—hardly worth living, and then things will change. And don’t tell them it’s capitalistic belaboring that makes them feel this way! Animals that cannot hunt and cannot provide become depressed with their injury, resigned to decay.

            “Crime is the law of nature,” Hannibal says, spooning salmoriglio over a cut of light, flaky grilled fish that Will wrought from the stream where they had their picnic, “To lure is not a manmade concept. It is animalistic. You’re a fine hunter, Will.”

            Will doesn’t say it, but once again, trapped in this hotel, sick to his stomach with claustrophobia and dependency and the psychological insistence from Hannibal about how he _is_ , depicted in the drawings of a recovered Pelops-Graham, he thinks that he is a trained dog.

            He leans against his provider and kisses once over his pulse that’s adhered to a careful, steady beat, unnaturally calm and perpetual, and thinks they’re not at all primitivists, but maybe they are robots.

**Author's Note:**

> I like the psychology of location and also the human vs. nature bullshit. Also, finals? What finals?
> 
> Hope you enjoyed and I don't fail out of college!
> 
> Support me/make a request: ko-fi.com/bibles


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